[Foundation-l] Options for community organization

[Ray Saintonge]

Harel Cain wrote:
> My take on the matter [hi everyone, glad to join the list!] is that
> you have to bear in mind that for some of the most active editors on
> Wikimedia projects, this activity is a major hobby and an important
> part of their [our] social life. People want to make a difference,
> even stand out in their own special way. "Organizing" stuff is just
> such a way. It happens in any hobby-based club, congregation etc.
> That's people!
>
> The "bane" of the Wikimedia-editing hobby is that it's basically a
> solitary experience of people sitting at home in front of the
> computer. There's just so much goodwill activity of "organizing stuff"
> that people can do in this environment, even if you take into account
> all committees, projects, meetups etc. etc. That's also why the online
> "managerial" roles are so coveted.
>
> I think if you look this way at all attempts to form assemblies,
> councils, you name it -- then they become the natural, understandable
> processes that they are, even if they cannot always be objectively
> justified .
These are interesting observations, and all the more so because your 
views have not been tainted by chronic participation.  The lack of 
objective justification is a frequent feature of anything that has not 
yet been developed.  A circular argument arises because objective 
justification depends on what the feature does, but what the feature 
does requires that it have objective justification to spend time on the 
idea.

In a broad sense we do have a lot of people engaged in organizational 
goodwill, but we also have a large segment of the population resisting 
any kind of organization that is not consistent with their own vision.  
The managerial roles are coveted because of their implicit power, 
notwithstanding the protestations that these roles are defined as no 
more than janitorial.

Ec